Roland Ennos - The Age of Wood: Our Most Useful Material and the Construction of Civilization

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Copyright 2020 by Roland Ennos

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First Scribner hardcover edition December 2020

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Jacket artwork of The Port of Brest with a View of Shipping, 1794, by Jean-Franois Hue (1751-1823), Oil on Canvas, Photo by Deagostini/Getty Images

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN 978-1-9821-1473-2

ISBN 978-1-9821-1475-6 (ebook)

Illustrations on pages Duncan Slater.

Insert photograph credits: . NinaRundsveen/Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

To Robin Wootton, the best of mentors

M any years ago, toward the end of an arduous walking tour of the French Pyrenees, my brother and I stumbled across an engineering feat that had helped change the course of human history and shape the modern world. As we made our way down from the peaks to the village of Etsaut, the route took us from alpine meadows to the conifer forests of the Valle dAspe. The path, which had been broad and easy to follow, suddenly changed. As the river valley continued to drop, the path maintained its level, but only by cutting into the walls of an almost-sheer rock face. Soon we were walking along a narrow ledge perched precariously six hundred feet above the trees and foaming river in the Gorge dEnfer below. The path continued like this for almost a mile before the gorge finally opened out, and we descended down to the level of the river and once again felt safe. Only then did a sign helpfully tell us that we had navigated the Chemin de la Mture. Why had such a spectacular path been built in the middle of nowhere? And what was mture?

The answer lies in the rivalry that developed in the eighteenth century between the two emerging superpowers of the Western world, France and Britain, and provides just one of the more striking examples of the way wood has helped shape the human story. With the two nations vying for power and influence over their developing colonies and territories in the Caribbean and North America, an arms race started as they built up their navies. Both nations strove to build bigger and more heavily armed ships of the line, capable of acting as firing platforms for up to a hundred huge cannons, which could batter other ships and shore defenses into submission. But both countries came up against the same problem; how could they access enough trees to build their ships? The problem was not the lack of wood itself. France in particular had large areas of forest, which covered around 30 percent of the country. The problem was the lack of trees tall and straight enough to make the 100-to-120-foot masts of the ships. Most forests in Europe were already being managed, and it was becoming harder to find areas of primary forest where tall trees could still be found. For France the answer lay in the wilds of the Pyrenees, where stands of huge fir trees still stood. The engineer Paul-Marie Leroy put forward his plan to extract trees from the previously inaccessible Valle dAspe by cutting a daring path through the edge of the cliff. The path was completed in 1772 and named the Chemin de la Mture (literally, the Mast Road). Soon masts and other timbers were being hauled down the new path, before being rafted down to the sea. Frances supply problems were fixed, at least temporarily.

In Britain the problem of obtaining masts was even more acute. The country had a tree cover below 10 percent, and its forests had long before been put under management. Few conifers grew there, and no trees tall and straight enough to be made into ships masts. Even by the sixteenth century, Britain had been forced to obtain almost all its masts from the countries adjoining the Baltic Sea. The problem was that the fleets of its northern rivals, Holland and Sweden, were always threatening to cut off this supply, and in any case tall trees were becoming scarcer and more expensive. Britain turned to its American colonies, where the old-growth forests of New England contained huge, straight-trunked eastern white pine trees in seemingly limitless numbers. From the mid-seventeenth century onward these trees, which could grow up to 230 feet tall with a diameter of over five feet, became the tree of choice for the British navy; Samuel Pepys, the naval administrator, mentions the trade several times in his famous diary, rejoicing on December 3, 1666, when a convoy carrying masts managed to evade a Dutch blockade:

There is also the very good news come of four New England ships come home safe to Falmouth with masts for the King; which is a blessing mighty unexpected, and without which, if for nothing else, we must have failed the next year. But God be praised for thus much good fortune, and send us the continuance of his favour in other things!

Unfortunately, in seeking to secure their supply of masts, the British government made a series of policy blunders that were to have disastrous consequences. They had difficulty buying tree trunks on the open market because the colonists preferred to saw them up for timber; this was after all a much easier way of processing them, considering their huge size, rather than hauling the unwieldy trunks for miles down to navigable rivers. The British could have bought up areas of forest and managed them themselves, but instead, in 1691 they implemented what was known as the Kings Broad Arrow policy. White pine trees above twenty-four inches in trunk diameter were marked with three strokes of a hatchet in the shape of an upward-pointing arrow and were deemed to be crown property. Unfortunately, this policy soon proved to be wildly unpopular and totally unenforceable. Colonists continued to fell the huge trees and cut them into boards twenty-three inches wide or less, to dispose of the evidence. Indeed wide floorboards became highly fashionable, as a mark of an independent spirit. The British responded by rewriting the protection act to prohibit the felling of all white pine trees over twelve inches in diameter. However, because trees were protected only if they were not growing within any township or the bounds, lines and limits thereof, the people of New Hampshire and Massachusetts promptly realigned their borders so that the provinces were divided almost entirely into townships. Many rural colonists just ignored the rules, pleaded ignorance of them, or deliberately targeted the marked trees because of their obvious value. The surveyors general of His Majestys Woods, employing few men and needing to cover tens of thousands of square miles, were almost powerless to stop the depredations of the colonists, and the local authorities were unwilling to enforce an unpopular law. The situation reached a crisis in 1772, exactly when the Chemin de la Mture was being completed, with the event known as the Pine Tree Riot.